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The Official Yoder Smokers Forum has been launched! We invite you to join whether you are a Yoder owner, a fan of the brand or just love barbecue! This is a fantastic place to meet owners, talk cooking and get the low down on all Yoder products.

Like most large manufacturing facilities, our factory has a decently sized room where the shipping dock doors are located and where shipping pallets are built. Unlike most manufacturing facilities, however, a corner of our shipping dock has been given over full time to the testing of our smokers and grills. Today we have some YS640 Pellet Cookers in the test bay.

We use an eight-channel calibrated temperature data recorder to monitor what’s happening in the pit at various points of the cooking grate. As manufacturers, we typically want to know the same things a cook wants to know – how much a pit’s grate temperature deviates from side-to side, how long it takes to go from zero to cooking temp, how well a temperature is held once it’s dialed in, etc.

In the case of the pellet cookers, we also have a companion piece of software we developed in-house that connects directly with a cooker and records a stream of data that gives us a detailed look at the internal state of the cooker’s microcontroller as well the various physical components like the fans, auger, and igniter.

After we finish collecting a run of data, we marry the cooker datastream and the standalone temperature data logger’s data together to get a coherent picture of of the overall run, which is when we can begin making intelligent decisions about new features or product lines.

We’ve spent many thousands of hours in the test bay, ensuring that our products are the best we can possibly make them, and that they are, in fact, competition grade.

We’re really excited about what’s been happening with our website. We’ve made a huge effort to make this site easy to use and fill it with our products specifications and awesome photographs – sort of the online equivalent of our competition grade products.

We’ve got some great plans for this blog. Product announcements, how-to videos, recipes and more. We welcome you to the new Yoder Smoker’s site – and to this blog, and encourage you to check back often. Be sure to find and follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well, as we’ll post there to let you know great new content is waiting for you here.